I just had to share this great article over on Foxxfur’s site. It’s this kind of searching that I find myself doing on a regular basis as I’m tracing the history of different parts of the Disney Parks. It’s such a well written and researched piece about one of the most loved resorts at Walt Disney World!

7 new Magic Kingdom maps added today, all from the late 90’s. Wow, there were a lot of those! Some of those maps were only good for 4-7 days, since they updated many of the performance times, etc within the map itself, rather than having a separate times schedule. You have to wonder how much money that cost to change the printing so often!

I have also been working on some back-end stuff that should make browsing the maps more interesting. When it’s closer to being ready to reveal, I will talk more about the new features!

Longtime friends of the site Jim and Dotty Hart recently contributed about 15 maps, and I have been scanning them this past week. They are now uploaded for all to enjoy. Since I don’t yet have a way to search the maps by upload date or contributor, the maps are:
Magic Kingdom: January 2002, and March, May and June of 2013
Epcot: June 2002, March 2003, July 2007 and March 2013
MGM/Hollywood Studios: January 2002, July 2003, January 2007, February 2007, and April, May and June of 2013

I now have all maps up to the present for Animal Kingdom, including the 15th Anniversary special map. That now brings the total number of maps that are online up to 270! That’s a lot of scanning folks! I now have representative maps for all the Orlando parks for their entire histories. I will be adding more maps to fill in some gaps, but first I think I will head west out to California and start putting up maps from Disneyland and California Adventure. Hope you enjoy!

Today I added about a dozen more maps for Animal Kingdom between 2000 and 2003. It’s always a relief to get past the end of 2001, when they stopped doing maps every few days. It seems like getting from 1995 to 2001 takes forever, since those were the years they put out maps about every 3-6 days. Starting in 2002 it went back to a few different maps per year. At least with Animal Kingdom I didn’t have to start until 1998!

I spent some time trying to improve the formatting for the map search and result pages. I think they’re still a work in progress, but at least they won’t make people’s eyes bleed anymore…

I also started the Animal Kingdom maps. It’s really just the first year for now, a total of 8 maps. There are some pretty neat ones, though, including special sneak preview/cast preview maps and the opening day map.

There are still no maps in Disneyland or California Adventure yet, so if you look for those there will be no results. I have quite a few of them, it’s just a matter of finding the time to get them scanned. Now that the site is more functional, there should be a little more time for more fun stuff like that.

Got a lot done over the weekend, between the Epcot and now Hollywood Studios maps. I have all of the scanned maps for Hollywood Studios up, from opening in 1989 up until the present. Fortunately, (or unfortunately for me for all the work to do) it is actually only about a third or maybe half of the maps I actually have presently for that park.

Every map I have already scanned is now online. This represents a very small fraction of the maps I actually have, though. I plan to continue scanning and converting to PDF form as time allows, since it’s a pretty labor intensive process. Besides filling in maps for parks listed already, I have a large Animal Kingdom collection as well as every other Disney park in the world. I look forward to adding these in over time.

I managed to get all the remaining Epcot maps uploaded. I have more Epcot maps besides these, but these are the ones that are already scanned. It gets the online Earchive up to almost the present, save the most recent maps.